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Cherry Preserves
Wash, pick and stone the cherries, saving the juice. Allow one pound sugar to each pound fruit. Boil the juice and sugar to a thick syrup, then put in half the cherries and stew till nearly done. Take them out with a perforated spoon and lay on dishes. Put in the other half, let them stew as long as the first; then take out and lay in dishes. Meantime boil the syrup gently. When the cherries are cool, put them again in the syrup and boil a short time. Pour in a large bowl and cool, then put in glass jars and cover tightly. Scarlet short stems and large wax cherries are best for preserving.--Mrs. S.T.
The cooking method here is sound old preserving practice, but the finishing and storage instructions are not. The recipe ends by sealing warm-to-cool fruit in jars with no heat processing and no stated seal, which is where it fails by current standards.
- No processing step"Put in glass jars and cover tightly" was written for an era when a paraffin or waxed-paper cap over a high-sugar preserve was considered sufficient. Unprocessed jars do not form a vacuum seal, and surface mold on preserves is a documented spoilage route rather than a cosmetic problem. A current tested preserving recipe should be used instead.
- The fruit is cooled before jarringThe cherries are deliberately taken out, spread on dishes, cooled, returned to the syrup and only briefly reboiled. Filling jars with a mixture that has spent that long at room temperature, then sealing it cold, gives contamination every opportunity and gives the jar none of the heat it would need to be shelf-stable.
- Sweet cherries are borderline in aciditySour cherries sit comfortably around pH 3.3, but sweet varieties — including the pale "wax" cherries the recipe recommends — can run near or above 4.0. Sugar concentration does most of the preserving work here, and the recipe never establishes a finished sugar density, so there is no way to know whether a given batch reached it.
- "A thick syrup" is not a measurementNineteenth-century preservers judged the setting point by eye, by thread, or by feel on a cold plate. Because the recipe gives neither a temperature nor a test, two cooks following it exactly can end up with two quite different products, one of which keeps and one of which does not.
- What the pound-for-pound ratio meansEqual weights of sugar and stoned fruit is the classic full-sugar preserve, and it is genuinely the protective element in the recipe. It is worth understanding as the logic behind the dish even though the ratio alone does not make an unprocessed sealed jar safe.
- "Wax cherries"[5] "Wax cherries" -- this most likely refers to the pale, yellow-blushed sweet cherries of the Royal Ann/Napoleon sort (one cultivar under two names), valued for preserving because they hold their shape and turn translucent in syrup. "Scarlet short stems" cannot be matched with confidence to any variety still sold; the intent appears to be a firm, unblemished cherry.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and published in 1878, drew its contents from a wide circle of Southern housewives -- the title page credits some two hundred and fifty contributors -- which is why so many entries close with initials rather than a name; Mrs. S.T. here is one of those credited only in shorthand. Preserving on this scale was a summer obligation rather than a treat: a household with fruit trees had a few weeks in which to convert a crop into something that would last the winter, and sugar was the tool. The technique of cooking the fruit in two batches and lifting it out on a perforated spoon is the mark of a careful preserver -- it keeps the syrup at temperature, prevents the cherries from crushing under their own weight, and lets the fruit cool and reabsorb syrup so it plumps rather than shrivels. That patience with the fruit, followed by an almost offhand instruction to cover the jars tightly, is characteristic of the period: the cooking was well understood, the microbiology was not.